Monthly Archives: March 2021

News: Join Sarah Kunst and Julia Collins for a live Q&A today at noon PT/3pm ET

• March 10, 2021
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Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations. Collins is now

Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations.

Collins is now on to her next venture in the form of Planet FWD, which has attracted funding from a number of investors including BBG Ventures, Emerson Capital and Cleo Capital.

Today, on Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Collins and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst. We’ll chat about what was learned from Zume and how that is shaping Planet FWD, as well as Kunst’s interest in sustainability startups and why she bet on Collins. We’ll also talk about how founders can make the most of their pitch meetings, particularly in this virtual environment, and how to work with their investors and board members once they’ve landed the capital.

As with every episode of Extra Crunch Live, Kunst and Collins will give live feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience in the Pitch Deck Teardown. If you want to share your pitch deck and get feedback from our experts on a future show, you can submit your deck here.

There is, however, one change to today’s show.

Extra Crunch members have always (and will always) had free access to Extra Crunch Live, both live and on demand. But today, we’ll also be selling tickets a la carte to the show. That’s right! Anyone can come hang out, ask their own questions to Collins and Kunst, and learn a thing or two from the seasoned experts.

The episode airs at 12pm PT/3pm ET today and will go for an hour.

You can hit up this link to either register (if you’re logged into Extra Crunch, the ticket is free) or purchase a ticket.

A full library of past episodes can be found here, and folks interested in checking out our future slate can find everything they need right here.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20 percent off at checkout right here.

News: Russia is trying to throttle Twitter

• March 10, 2021
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In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement a total block on the service.

However the action by the comms regulator to slow down all Twitter’s mobile traffic and 50% of desktop users in Russia appeared to have briefly taken down Roskomnadzor’s own website earlier today.

Reports also circulated on social media that Russian government websites, including kremlin.ru, had been affected. At the time of writing these sites were accessible but earlier we were unable to access Roskomnadzor’s site.

The stand-off between the state agency and Twitter comes at a time when Russia is trying to clamp down on anti-corruption protestors who are supporters of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny — who has, in recent weeks, called for demonstrators to take to the streets to ramp up pressure on the regime.

Roskomnadzor’s statement makes no mention of the state’s push to censor political opposition — claiming only that the content it’s throttling Twitter for failing to delete is material relating to minors committing suicide; child pornography; and drug use. Hence it also claims to be taking the action to “protect Russian citizens”. However a draconian application of speech-chilling laws to try to silence political opposition are nothing new in Putin’s Russia.

The Russian regime has sought to get content it doesn’t like removed from foreign-based social media services a number of times in recent years, including — as now — resorting to technical means to limit access.

Most notoriously, back in 2018, an attempt by Russia to block access to the messaging service Telegram resulted in massive collateral damage to the local Internet as the block took down millions of (non-Telegram-related) IP addresses — disrupting those other services.

Also in 2018 Facebook-owned Instagram complied with a Russian request to remove content posted by Navalny — which earned it a shaming tweet from the now jailed politician.

Although now behind bars in Russia — Navalny was jailed in February, after Russia claimed he had violated the conditions of a suspended sentence — the prominent Putin critic has continued to use his official Twitter account as a megaphone to denounce corruption and draw attention to the injustice of his detention, following his attempted poisoning last year (which has been linked to Russia’s FSB).

Recent tweets from Navalny’s account include amplification of an investigation by the German newspaper Bild into RT DE, the Russian state-controlled media outlet Russia Today’s German channel — which the newspaper accuses of espionage in German targeting Navalny and his associates (he was staying in a German hospital in Berlin at the time, recovering from the attempted poisoning).

Slowing down access to Twitter is one way for Russia to try to put a lid on Navalny’s critical output on the platform — which also includes a recent retweet of a video claiming that Russian citizen’s taxes were used this winter by Putin and his cronies to fund yachts, whiskey and a Maldivian vacation.

Navalny’s account has also tweeted in recent hours to denounce his jailing by the Russian state following its attempt to poison him — saying: “This situation is called attempted murder”.

At the time of writing Twitter had not responded to requests for comment on Roskomnadzor’s action.

However last month, in a worrying development in India that’s also related to anti-government protests (in that case by farmers who are seeking to reverse moves to deregulate the market), Twitter caved in to pressure from the government — shuttering 500 accounts including some linked to the anti-government protests.

It also agreed to reduce the visibility of certain protest hashtags.

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News: LatAm corporate spend-management startup Clara raises $3.5M, comes out of stealth

• March 10, 2021
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This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst. The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp

This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst.

The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp to Airbase to Teampay, investors have poured capital into startups working to help companies better track and manage their spend.

Companies working in the fintech niche tend to monetize in one of two ways, namely interchange revenues and software incomes. Or more simply, some in the corporate spend category generate revenues when users swipe cards, earning a slice of the transaction. And some also charge for the software that they have wrapped around their cards and other methods of payment.

Clara is in the first camp, making its revenues today from interchange incomes, according to Gerry Giacomán Colyer and Diego Iván García Escobedo, the company’s co-founders. Colyer is the company’s CEO, while García Escobedo heads its product and tech work.

The pair told TechCrunch that the Mexican interchange market is more akin to the United States’ own (lucrative) than Europe’s own (less lucrative), meaning that if the company can sign up a host of customers for its free service — empieza hoy – sin costo, its website intones — it could post the same sort of revenue growth that has spurred some of its American comps to huge venture capital raises.

The startup’s potential has caught the eye of more than General Catalyst, a well-known venture capital firm. The two co-founders of Ramp are also investors in Clara. The startup’s round also included funds from a host of smaller firms and angels, including Canary Ventures, Adapt Ventures and Picus Capital, among others.

The co-founders want to bridge the gap in technology-enabled financial services that they found in Mexico. Colyer worked for G2 after a stint at Stanford, eventually moving back to Mexico and working on a micromobility startup called Uva Scooters. He discovered during the process that Mexican and other Latin American firms lacked some digital tools, like low- and zero-cost corporate spend software, to which American companies had ample access.

So, the pair of founders, who met at Grin Scooters, which had acquired Uva, set out to build Clara, tuning a model with proven success in America to work in Mexico. What sort of tweaking was needed? Local compliance to ensure high-levels of card acceptance, support for local tax law and receipt management, the pair said.

Thus far the company has only worked with around 100 customers, with the co-founders telling TechCrunch they have seen traction with high-growth companies, some of which are startups. That echoes what Brex tapped into when it was a more youthful upstart itself.

Today the company operates in Mexico only, but intends to support other markets over time.

Regarding the company’s $3.5 million raise, like many pre-seed and seed deals, the funds were acquired in a few tranches, including one in May of 2020. The rest of the capital came later in the year.

Seeing successful startup models that are familiar in the United States pop up in Latin America is a regular trend. Belvo, for example, is following in the tracks that Plaid laid down, bringing fintech APIs to the LatAm market. Given rising smartphone penetration, and rising card usage, perhaps Clara will find a good fit in its home market.

Looking ahead, TechCrunch is curious how quickly Clara can accrete new customer companies now that it has formally launched. If it can, and the interchange game proves successful, expect to hear from it again soon.

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News: Optibus picks up $107M for an AI-based planning and operations platform aimed at mass transportation

• March 10, 2021
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Mass transportation is a critical part of how metropolitan areas keep moving, and today a startup that has built an AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently is announcing a huge round of funding to grow its business and tackle a new set of opportunities and challenges in the modern city. Optibus —

Mass transportation is a critical part of how metropolitan areas keep moving, and today a startup that has built an AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently is announcing a huge round of funding to grow its business and tackle a new set of opportunities and challenges in the modern city.

Optibus — a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides a platform to analyze how vehicles and people move around in cities and then provides navigation, scheduling, driver rostering and other guidance for mass transportation providers to service those cities better — has picked up $107 million, a Series C that it will be using to continue expanding the kinds of services that it provides to customers.

This Series C is coming at the same time that the startup is launching a new Geospatial Suite that is part of that platform expansion. It provides tools to visualize and predict movement alongside different transportation options, fitting in with the shift that many cities are making to encouraging multi-modal travel covering buses, trains, bikes, scooters and walking to offset traffic congestion from single-passenger cars.

Meanwhile, Optibus’ customers include city governments and other companies and organizations that have implemented mass transportation systems (these include those who have large campuses, but also, for example, big tech companies that operate private shuttle services to bring users who live in one place to their headquarters in another); huge mass transportation providers; electric and other vehicle makers; and more.

In a city like London, CEO and co-founder Amos Haggiag says that it helps run 30% of the city’s public transportation, focused mainly around bus usage, and 25% of public transportation in the U.K. market overall.

The funding is being co-led by two investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners, with previous investors Verizon Ventures*, Pitango, New Era Capital Partners, Dynamic Loop and Blue Red Partners also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation but Haggiag told me that it’s gone up 4X since its last round in 2018.

Indeed, this is a significant round for Optibus, which prior to this had only raised around $55 million since first opening for business in 2014. The size of this Series C underscores the company’s traction and also the potential opportunities of being a transportation data provider at the moment.

Cities exist between a rock and a hard place these days. They have to continue to focus on how to operate well while also getting increasingly crowded — a long-term trend that’s existed for decades. But now, on top of that, dense metro areas also have to figure out how to operate safely at a time when effective social distancing can make the difference between life and death. These two imperatives are often at odds with each other.

While you might assume that social distancing has meant less rather than more use of public transportation, you would be right, but that’s not the full story. Haggiag said that in the last year Optibus has had a surge of new business and increased usage from its customers, not because they are handling more passengers — some cities have seen as much as an 80% drop in passenger revenues, he said — but because buses and other transportation modes have remained running as essential services, but ones that need to be better organised and spaced out than ever before, in order to be run responsibly.

The role of a company like Optibus has been to bring technology into an equation that has been tackled mostly as an offline problem before now.

“People sit in a room to map these routes out. It’s very old school stuff,” said Haggiag. “There so much budget involved and also lots of data that no one uses. No one had previously tried to figure out the patterns.”

While cars have long been the default transportation option in many parts of the world for decades, we have seen a gradual shift even in the most unlikely of cities, like Los Angeles, where services are expanding not because people have suddenly decided they don’t love their cars, but because the growth in population has made the growth of more vehicles untenable. It’s led to a more extensive public transportation network, which has led to more people using it.

“Effective public transportation is a critical part of a well-functioning society, and with the rise of new mobility options and electric vehicles, paired with the added challenge of the pandemic, city operators face more complexity than ever,” said Alex Ferrara, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement. “Optibus stands out as a modern cloud-based solution that cuts through this complexity, allowing transit operators to plan routes and optimize schedules in minutes rather than days, promoting a more affordable and passenger-friendly experience. We are excited to partner with them as they build a global, world-class operating system for public transportation.”

*Disclosure: Verizon Ventures is part of Verizon, which owns TechCrunch. This did not influence my decision to cover this news.

News: Cheese raises $3.6M for its digital bank aimed at the Asian-American community

• March 10, 2021
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Many things have accelerated in the world of fintech over the past year, not the least of which is the trend of digital banks aimed at specific communities in the U.S. In the past few months alone, a number of neobanks targeting the Black and Latinx communities have emerged. Most recently, we covered the $5

Many things have accelerated in the world of fintech over the past year, not the least of which is the trend of digital banks aimed at specific communities in the U.S.

In the past few months alone, a number of neobanks targeting the Black and Latinx communities have emerged. Most recently, we covered the $5 million raise of one such bank — First Boulevard.

Today, Cheese announced the launch of its digital banking platform that is aimed at primarily serving the Asian-American community. Co-founder and CEO Ken Lian came to the United States from China in 2008 to attend college. In the years after his move, Lian said he paid thousands of dollars in bank fees and got rejected “multiple times” for basic bank accounts, despite having a FICO score over 800.

Those experiences led him to come up with the concept behind Cheese, which he said will offer its banking services via a multi-language platform. The one-year-old startup also has a social component, giving customers a way to support Asian-American businesses and organizations. Lian is no stranger to the world of entrepreneurship, having also founded Moolah Science, a startup that helped consumers find out if online stores owed them a refund that got acquired by a Fortune 500 company in 2019.

Lian founded Cheese along with Zhen Wang and Qingyi Li under the premise that Asian-Americans are often subject to discrimination and “an unequal playing field” in America despite being among the most educated in the country.

“We understand Asian users much better than anybody else because we are the user,” Lian told TechCrunch. “[Traditional] banking didn’t understand me or my culture or my lifestyle or what matters to me. Our needs are different.”

“A lot of challenger banks also never focused on Asian communities and immigrants,” he added. “We want to provide a great product to welcome these people to the U.S. and make it easy for them to bank.”

Over the past year, Cheese has raised a total of $3.6 million in funding from investors such as iFly.vc; Amplify; Adam Nash, former CEO of Wealthfront; Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff and VC firms Wedbush Ventures, Idealab and Operate Venture Studio. The startup has also partnered with actor Jimmy Wong, an advocate for Asian rights. He will serve as Cheese’s chief community ambassador.

Cheese’s platform provides a debit Mastercard (issued by Coastal Community Bank), which is available to those with no credit history. (If this sounds familiar, it’s a similar offering as that of TomoCredit, a startup that recently raised $7 million to scale its debit card product for those with little or no credit history.)

Cheese cardholders can use the virtual cards instantly through their mobile wallets, the company said. Other features include offering advance pay up to two days early with direct deposit, a 3% deposit bonus for referring friends, 0.3% annual percentage yield (APY) and up to 10% cash back on purchases at more than10,000 merchants. 

Image Credits: Cheese

Han Shen, founding partner of iFly, believes Cheese can help the underbanked community in the United States.

“They don’t necessarily get the same kind of service or product for their banking needs and they face all kinds of pain points,” he wrote. “Cheese has a list of products they want to develop for that type of customer…We know there is a product market fit based on our research and we know this is a strong team.”

The investment marks iFly’s first in the consumer fintech space in which it acted as a lead investor.

“We were already determined to invest on the mission side. They wanted to make things easier and better for the underbanked, including immigrants,” Shen continued. “People deserve a better service. In Cheese’s case, the question is not whether or not to provide it, the question is about how to do it right to address their pain points.”

In conjunction with its launch, Cheese has pledged $100,000 to the Cheese Giveback Fund, 100% of which will be donated to nonprofits and community service programs in support of Asian neighborhoods and businesses impacted by violence and economic hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

News: Facebook targets emerging markets with the launch of Instagram Lite, an Android app that takes up just 2MB, in 170 countries

• March 10, 2021
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Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and storage-intensive Android-only version of one of

Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and storage-intensive Android-only version of one of its popular photo and video app, which will take up just 2MB on a phone and is going live in 170 countries, with a focus on emerging markets, today.

Instagram Lite is launching with all the basic bells and whistles around editing, sharing and viewing photos and videos, as well as the ability to add stickers, create and view Stories, IGTV and the Explore discovery and recommendation algorithms. And given the launch across 170 countries, it’s coming with specific language support to be usable in those markets.

But to whittle down the experience from the 30MB that full-fat Instagram takes up on iOS and Android devices (and countless MB of mobile data usage), it’s launching without some things, too.

Namely, the developers have left out many graphics; they haven’t included advertising; and it’s missing some key features like dark mode, Shopping, and end-to-end encryption. (Notably, encryption was reportedly being worked on for the main app in 2019, but it has yet to launch). Nor are there iOS or feature phone versions of the app in the works.

Facebook said that some of that list — such as dark mode, and (of course) adverts — will be added in future updates.

Instagram Lite has been teased out in different forms by Facebook since 2018, and it’s hitting what has proven to be a receptive market for the social media giant. Tzach Hadar, Tel Aviv-based director of product management for all of Facebook’s Lite apps — which also include versions of Facebook and Messenger, also built in Tel Aviv — said this week that Facebook Lite now has more than 200 million monthly active users.

That’s just a fraction of the billions that use Facebook itself, but represents a key way of targeting those newer to Facebook or those who might not otherwise be using the app because of financial or bandwidth constraints.

But although Instagram is wildly popular and would have been an obvious candidate for the Lite treatment years ago, and Instagram Lite was one of the most requested items from users in developing markets, it has proven to be trickier beast.

That’s not just because the app focuses on images and videos, which by their nature use up more bandwidth and data; but because over the years Instagram has become increasingly laden with features: those aimed at enhancing the user experience; those aimed at competing better with other apps (hello, Stories); and those to extend monetization opportunities for Facebook.

“Instagram offered another kind of unique challenge for us to deliver under the same constraints the same experience,” said Nick Brown, a product manager based out of New York (the app was co-developed across Facebook’s Tel Aviv and NYC offices and — presumably, given the year we’ve had — across many Facebook employees’ homes). “The philosophy is really that we want to bring all of Instagram to these users.”

Image Credits: Facebook

Indeed, as with other Lite versions of apps like Facebook and Messenger, Instagram Lite is geared towards consumers in emerging economies, where smartphones are most likely to be Android-based and less likely to be top-of-the-range devices; consumers are more likely to be more price- and bandwidth-sensitive when it comes to using mobile data; and a substantial proportion are still only now getting to grips with being online.

Facebook notes estimates that show 65% of emerging market populations are online versus 90% in North America, which is one reason why the company focuses so squarely on serving those users: they represent growth at a time when growth has slowed down, or become significantly more competitive against newer entrants, in its more mature markets like the U.S. and Europe.

However, building for the demands of developing markets can often, by their nature, run counter to the concept of building in ever more features as you might otherwise see with highly competitive consumer apps.

The Instagram Lite app had some fits and starts over the years, with the first version, built on React Native, launching in a limited release back in 2018, taking up a mere 573kb of space on a device. It also came without a lot of features, but Instagram itself had less features, too. While it was never explained why, that version was quietly pulled last year, and then shortly after a newer version was launched again in December in a limited test. Debuted first in India, a key market for the company, Instagram Lite launched there with support for Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

And it’s that last test that has turned into the official Instagram Lite app. Interestingly, it turns out that in the process, the whole app was rebuilt, moving it away from Facebook’s own React Native framework and building it instead on an internal framework called Bloks (not to be confused with Bloks), heavy lifting a lot of the basic workings from Messenger and Facebook’s Lite versions. I’ve asked for more detail about this, and I wonder if it’s related to LightSpeed, which was a development shift that saw a lighter and new version of Messenger get released last year.

“Bloks is a framework that is much more performant and has more features and capabilities, and this new Instagram light application is built upon it,” said Hadar. “So it’s like a new app altogether.” It’s not clear what exactly happened behind the scenes leading to the previous app getting pulled, but it seems that in any case the foundations now give the company more room for expanding the service (even while bumping up the app size from under 600kb to 2MB).

That fact might matter less to users, but does point to some notable trends at the company itself and how it’s approaching tech in the future, and viewing feature parity between full and Lite versions of its flagship apps.

News: Savannah Fund launches $25M fund to invest in African startups at seed and Series A

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Savannah Fund, a pan-African venture capital firm, today announced a $25 million fund as it looks to back more early-stage startups on the continent. Since launching in 2012, Savannah Fund —  led by Mbwana Alliy and Paul Bragiel — has backed more than 30 startups. Some of its well-known investments include South African car subscription

Savannah Fund, a pan-African venture capital firm, today announced a $25 million fund as it looks to back more early-stage startups on the continent.

Since launching in 2012, Savannah Fund —  led by Mbwana Alliy and Paul Bragiel — has backed more than 30 startups. Some of its well-known investments include South African car subscription company, FlexClub; Kenyan on-demand logistics company, Sendy; and Nigerian fintech company, Lidya.

Before becoming a VC firm, Savannah Fund started as an accelerator program in Kenya. Startups who got accepted participated in cohorts for three months and received up to $30,000 in funding. However, in 2016, Savannah transitioned into venture capital investing, focusing on seed and Series A stages within $25,000 to $500,000 checks.

This is the second fund for the nine-year-old Mauritius-headquartered investment firm. It has secured a first close led by International Finance Corporation (IFC) with participation from the Women’s Finance Initiative (WeFi). US investor Tim Draper via his VC fund, Draper Associates and Visa Forsten, co-founder of Tencent-owned Supercell, are other notable investors. 

Mbwana Ally (Managing Partner, Savannah Fund)

Speaking with TechCrunch, Alliy said the firm has invested in seven startups already with the first close, which indicates effort on their part that would help close the rest of the fund.

“We raised from some angel investors, high net worth individuals, so when we the official fund launched, we rolled these select companies into the fund,” Alliy said. “We think if you can show that you already have investments you’ve made with your own money, it’s easier to raise from institutional investors, and I think we’re on that path.”

These seven startups cut across the firm’s focus areas, including fintech, edtech, logistics and e-commerce, SaaS, healthtech, and agritech. The disclosed investments include South African agritech Aerobotics and car subscription FlexClub, Ethiopian healthtech Orbit Health and Kenyan-based Safigen, Moringa School and Ando Foods.

The firm has a presence in Kenya, South African and Tanzania, but its core markets remain Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The managing partner says Savannah is big on startups that can scale across regions in Africa — Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda in East Africa; Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa; and globally. This is typical of some of the startups in its portfolio — Aerobotics recently expanded to the US, Sendy is an established East African player, and FlexClub operates in Mexico.

“I know it might sound cliche, but we really want founders in our portfolio to think big enough, and we will help them get there,” he said.

The firm has doubled the ticket size from its first fund to $50,000 to $1 million. The fund plans to invest as low as $50,000 at the pre-seed, but typical first check sizes will be between $150,000 to 250,000. Follow up rounds that will likely involve larger amounts will depend on the firm’s position as a lead investor or not. 

In 2020, Savannah Fund’s portfolio raised $118 million across Series A, B and C, with some operating in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. With this new fund, Alliy said the firm is looking to perform better this year and increase its portfolio from 30 to 50 in the foreseeable future.  

The firm also acknowledges the role its backer — WeFi — will be playing in increasing these numbers, especially those led by female founders.

“Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIRs), especially female founders, are a key part of our investment strategy as we have seen with the success of Moringa School, Safigen and Sendy – all 3 of which have women founders/CEOs who previously worked with Savannah as EIRs, Associates & Interns. We’re proud to partner with WeFi to further expand and encourage female founders on the continent. Even during a pandemic, we held 3 internships in 2020, some virtual and some in-person in Kenya and Tanzania,” the statement read.

Lead investor IFC confirmed the news with TechCrunch. According to its statement, the World Bank Group member invested $3 million while We-Fi cut a $500,000 check for the fund.

“Early-stage funding is vital to enable more of Africa’s emerging and growing tech founders to grow their business and fuel the transformation of Africa’s internet economy. By partnering with Savannah Fund, we can help more entrepreneurs to access funding,” said Kevin Njiraini, IFC regional director for Southern Africa and Nigeria.

Paul Bragiel (Generap Partner, Savannah Fund)

Savannah’s second fund is a continuation of the firm’s network with Stanford University. Steve Ciesinski, the president of Stanford Research Institute and co-lectures on an entrepreneurship course with Alliy, joins the firm’s Investment Committee.

Tommy Chia, a Hong-Kong based investor with an active portfolio in Africa like Paga and OneFi, joins the team as a venture partner. Erik Hersman, the co-founder of multiple companies in Kenya, including BRCK, Ushahidi, iHub Nairobi, and Savannah Fund, moves to a senior advisory role while running BRCK full-time. 

Bragiel, the firm’s general partner with investments in multi-billion dollar companies like Unity, Niantic (Pokemon Go) & Zappos, continues to run the fund with Alliy. That said, Savannah Fund joins the likes of Knife Capital and Uncovered Fund that have launched funds dedicated to startups across the continent since the turn of the year.

News: Cloud cybersecurity startup Lumu raises a $7.5 million Series A

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Miami-based cybersecurity startup Lumu today announced the closing of its $7.5 million Series A. The round was co-led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund and Panoramic Ventures. Lumu, co-founded and headed by Colombian native Ricardo Villadiego, offers a cloud-based service that helps companies continually scan and react to data compromises in real time. The

Miami-based cybersecurity startup Lumu today announced the closing of its $7.5 million Series A. The round was co-led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund and Panoramic Ventures.

Lumu, co-founded and headed by Colombian native Ricardo Villadiego, offers a cloud-based service that helps companies continually scan and react to data compromises in real time. The company collects and standardizes metadata from across the network, including DNS queries, network traffic, access logs from perimeter proxies, firewalls and spam box filters, then applies AI to correlate threat intelligence from these disparate data sources to isolate confirmed points of compromise.

Lumu CEO Ricardo Villadiego. Image Credits: Lumu

Villadiego described it in lay terms: “If you’re speaking with a bad guy, there’s no good that’s going to come from that. So we apply the same idea with cybersecurity. If your phone or your laptop is talking to an adversary, you don’t really need to understand what the conversation is about,” he said. What you do need to do, he says, is shut it down and prevent it from happening again.

He explained that Lumu not only helps companies prevent breaches but also allows them to automate their responses.

Lumu launched in February 2020 at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, and already has 1,300 enterprise customers and targets small to large corporations. In just over 12 months, the company said it has analyzed more than 55 billion metadata records and detected more than 11 million adversarial contacts.

Villadiego was born and raised in the colonial port town of Cartagena, Colombia. With a degree in electrical engineering, he found his passion for cybersecurity while working at Unisys, which, through its cybersecurity excellence program, is how he ended up in the United States.

During his time at Unisys — and later at IBM — he said he was exposed to merger and acquisition deals, motivating him to start his own business. He founded his first cybersecurity company, Easy Solutions, in Miami in 2009, focused on preventing fraud. Easy Solutions caught the eye of tech heavyweight — and Miami local — Manny Medina of the eponymous Medina Capital, who invested in the company’s first round.

“I told him we were looking to raise $5 million and he said, ‘I’m in, but it has to be $10 million,’” Villadiego told TechCrunch.

The two eventually agreed on $11 million, and about a decade later Medina’s own company — Cyxtera — bought Easy Solutions for an undisclosed sum. Cyxtera announced last month that it’s going public at a $3.4 billion valuation through a merger with a SPAC.

Villadiego said Lumu, which has 35 full-time employees, will use the funds to fuel growth in the United States.

“In the U.S., I understand all the issues that we have — especially with diversity — but if you work hard, you have the chance to change your story,” said Villadiego. “At the end of the day, you have to build a business. The hardest part for any entrepreneur is getting access to capital.”

With funding help from SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, which helps Black, Latinx and Native American founders and entrepreneurs in the U.S., Villadiego said he can focus entirely on the work.

“Once you have access to SoftBank, you sort of forget about the money part, because you know you’ll have access to capital to build your company,” he said. “Now your focus can be on execution — to make sure you’re solving the problem.”

News: Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security service

• March 10, 2021
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Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

News: Sources: Web Summit will spin out its virtual conference software as a full-blown startup

• March 10, 2021
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Sources say Web Summit, the giant tech conference company which specialized in very large gatherings in cities like Lisbon, is poised to spin out its Hopin-like proprietary conference software as an independent startup. Although it’s put out a statement today that it will be licensing its software to the United Nations Development Programme, I’ve spoken

Sources say Web Summit, the giant tech conference company which specialized in very large gatherings in cities like Lisbon, is poised to spin out its Hopin-like proprietary conference software as an independent startup. Although it’s put out a statement today that it will be licensing its software to the United Nations Development Programme, I’ve spoken to well-placed sources who say the platform will be spun out as a separate company and will raise venture funding, the context being that similar virtual conference platforms have already achieved million and billion-dollar valuations. A spokesperson denied the claim.

The software – which was first showcased at Collision in June 2020 and played host to 104,000 attendees at Web Summit in December 2020 – was initially designed to complement networking at physical events, but was flipped to work online after international travel was restricted for business and companies worldwide as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The United Nations Development Programme will be the first customer to run Web Summit’s conference software for its event – Istanbul Innovation Days, March 23-25.

Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO of Web Summit said: “We’ve agreed to run an event in March for the UNDP on our platform. We couldn’t imagine having a better first customer. It’s been a long journey, and we’ve taken it slow, perfecting the software over years. We’re in no rush for new customers, and we will take our time. In 2022, we hope to partner with other great events.” Speaking to TechCrunch, he denied the platform was to be spun-out.

However, our sources say investors are circling around the software platform in the light of the recent valuations of the likes of Zoom and Hopin, with the latter recently achieving a valuation of between $5 billion and $6 billion after its recent $400 million Series C.

The potential move come by Web Summit comes at an interesting time for the virtual events space.

Although Hopin’s valuation has soared, Zoom’s valuation has been called “impossible to justify”. And the huge growth of Microsoft Teams could hurt Zoom’s business as well.

That said, specialized virtual conference software is doing well, as we’ve seen with the recent $14m funding of Spatial and others.

Web Summit says will return to an in-person conference in November 2021, in Lisbon, Portugal.